Seacoast Media Diversity Census 2022: Let's keep going

In the picturesque Seacoast communities of New Hampshire and Maine, emotional struggles rooted in our nation’s uneasy relationship with race and racism have been hard to miss. 

In recent weeks, masked white supremacists have been seen spreading neo-Nazi and white nationalist propaganda in Portsmouth and Kittery. This is the same group that threatened the drag queen story hour at the Seacoast Repertory Theatre in December.

After Kittery officials issued a statement welcoming all citizens regardless of race, creed or color and declared that hate has no home within town borders, the same group, holding a white supremacy sign, stood outside a prominent local business. 

The increasing presence of the white supremacists is just an extreme example of a struggle that is taking place in virtually every Seacoast-area community. It is in this context that we are releasing our third annual workplace diversity census. 

Our newspapers, along with all of Gannett’s newspapers across the country, today released a snapshot of how the demographics of its journalists compare to the demographics of the communities they serve .  

With a goal of making sure all voices are heard fully and fairly, our company has set a goal of having newsroom demographics reflect the demographics of the communities they serve by 2025. During this snapshot in time, our newsroom is actually more racially and ethnically diverse than the communities we cover. But our commitment is ongoing. In the coming year, you’ll see us increase the diversity of voices on our opinion pages. You’ll see us working more closely with the thriving Indonesian community in Somersworth. We will work hard to make sure our articles truly reflect the lives of the people and communities we are covering and, when we fall short, we will move quickly to correct our mistakes. 

Since the census launched, the Portsmouth Herald/Seacoastonline and Foster’s have gone from being 100% white in 2020 to being, roughly 82% white, 6% Black and 12% Asian in 2022. The communities we cover are on average 90% white, 0.8% Black and 2.4% Asian.

2020 Census:What the numbers tell us about people of Seacoast

Demographics vary a bit from community to community. Somersworth, with its vibrant Indonesian population, is 6.6% Asian. The population is 99% white in York, Maine.

Standing-room-only crowds showed up in York last summer to protest the town’s Proclamation Against Racism, Discrimination and Bigotry, which affirms the community’s embrace of “people of every color, race, ethnicity, creed, sexual orientation and gender identity,” and concludes by saying the town “recognizes Black Lives Matter.” 

At one meeting, Town Manager Steve Burns read aloud racist and homophobic emails the town had received in response to rainbow-colored signs produced by the town’s Committee to Combat Racism and Bias, “just in case anyone thinks we don’t have any racism or bias in town.” 

York is not alone.

After looking at our newsroom staff census numbers, I searched our articles from the past year involving race and diversity and virtually every community had some sort of confrontation over race and equity.

Diversity census:A demographic snapshot of Herald/Foster's news staff and the Seacoast

Brentwood saw packed and heated meetings after the town-funded newsletter published an item labeled “editorial” with the headline: “Racism: From a White Man’s Perspective,” which criticized Black Lives Matter and questioned whether systemic racism exists. 

Denying systemic racism requires a willful misreading of American history, and there is a national effort to do just that.  

In New Hampshire, we saw the passage of HB 544, known as the “divisive concepts” law which, because it couldn’t pass as a stand-alone bill, was tucked into the state budget and signed into law by Gov. Chris Sununu. “Divisive concepts” was NH’s response to the Critical Race Theory scare gripping the political right. To date, none of the law’s proponents have shown evidence that CRT is taught in New Hampshire’s schools, and the law is now being challenged in court by the ACLU-NH and the state’s teachers' unions. But the law is already having its intended effect, as teachers acknowledge self-censoring and young teachers name it as a reason they are leaving the profession. 

One of the plaintiffs in the “divisive concepts” lawsuit is Andres Mejia, the director of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice for the Exeter Region Cooperative School District. Mejia was the first DEI director hired by a school district in the state, and he faced the wrath of a small but vocal part of the community who were suspicious of what he would be teaching. 

In Seabrook, a white man was found guilty of violating the state’s Civil Rights Act and lesser criminal charges for confronting a Black family at a gas station, threatening them and yelling racial slurs.  

Related:Gannett newsrooms making steady progress in overall diversity

In Dover, a white woman was found guilty of violating the state’s Civil Rights Act after threatening a 9-year-old Black boy and telling him she would “kneel on his neck,” a reference to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, after he accidentally broke a toy that belonged to her son. 

“The court concluded that this conduct was motivated by the victim’s race and had the purpose to terrorize or coerce the victim,” the Attorney General stated. 

Hampton struggled with “White Lives Matter” demonstrators regularly showing up in Marelli Square with racist, anti-Semitic and obscenity-ridden signs, which town leaders abhorred but could not stop due to First Amendment protections. 

Hampton’s “Warrior” mascot and Rochester’s “Red Raider” were also topics of heated debate in those communities. 

A land acknowledgement resolution proposed by Dover’s Racial Equity and Inclusion Committee met with resistance. Dover’s nickname is the “Garrison City.” Those garrisons were built during a time of conflict with the area’s first inhabitants, the indigenous Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki peoples. 

At a Stop Asian Hate rally in Portsmouth, a young father shared: “The barbs, the racial slurs hurt and are not what I want for my family. We all need to do better.” 

The above are just a small sampling of some of the race-centered debates that have taken place in our communities over the past year. There are many, many more. 

It would be wrong, however, not to note the many positive events in our community this past year, including the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire's well attended Juneteenth events, the celebration and placement of an historical marker at the former home and business of Pomp and Candace Spring, a once-enslaved couple who lived in Portsmouth from 1791 to 1807. We have seen efforts to preserve sites important to the region’s Black history and in September Portsmouth hosted its first BIPOC festival, celebrating the region’s diversity with food and music. Efforts to create the world’s first Little Indonesia in Somersworth have made great strides over the past 12 months. BLM Seacoast’s second annual Excellence Awards highlighting outstanding accomplishments of people of color whose hard work has benefitted the Seacoast were a rousing success.

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It was also good to see more than 200 citizens gather in Kittery Saturday night to rally and push back against white supremacy and other hateful propaganda.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

I have often been accused of being overly optimistic, although it’s hard to be both realistic and optimistic at this moment. But I choose to believe that our communities debating these issues, despite the pain and difficulty, is much better than a peaceful silence that exists only because people are pretending nothing is wrong.

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After one of those particularly heated meetings in York, Marilyn McLaughlin, the town’s only Black Select Board member, had this to say to the community. 

“I like everyone coming here.... I think it’s a good thing. It only points us where we need to go. So I welcome you all. I’m glad you are here. I think we should keep going.” 

That’s excellent advice. Let’s keep going.

Howard Altschiller has been Seacoast Media Group's executive editor since 2003.